Black Holes are Giant Fuzzballs, Theoretical Physicists Say

In 1997, cosmologists Stephen Hawking, Kip Thorne and John Preskill made a famous bet as to whether information that enters a black hole ceases to exist. Hawking and Thorne bet that information that enters a black hole is destroyed, while Preskill took the opposite view. Hawking’s research suggested that the particles have no effect whatsoever. But his theory violated the laws of quantum mechanics and created a contradiction known as the information paradox. New research by physicists from the Department of Physics at the Ohio State University attempts to resolve the debate over Hawking’s information paradox.

“What we found from string theory is that all the mass of a black hole is not getting sucked in to the center,” said Ohio State University’s Professor Samir Mathur, lead author of a paper published in the Turkish Journal of Physics.

“The black hole tries to squeeze things to a point, but then the particles get stretched into these strings, and the strings start to stretch and expand and it becomes this fuzzball that expands to fill up the entirety of the black hole.”

“We found that string theory almost certainly holds the answer to Hawking’s paradox, as they had originally believed.”

“We proved theorems to show that the fuzzball theory remains the most likely solution for Hawking’s information paradox.”

In 2004, Professor Mathur and colleagues theorized that black holes were similar to very large, very messy balls of yarn — ‘fuzzballs’ — that become larger and messier as new objects get sucked in.

“The bigger the black hole, the more energy that goes in, and the bigger the fuzzball becomes,” Professor Mathur said.

The physicsts found that string theory could be the solution to Hawking’s paradox. With this fuzzball structure, the hole radiates like any normal body, and there is no puzzle.

“After the study and other works, many people thought the problem was solved,” Professor Mathur said.

“But in fact, a section of people in the string theory community itself thought they would look for a different solution to Hawking’s information paradox.”

“They were bothered that, in physical terms, the whole structure of the black hole had changed.”

Studies in recent years attempted to reconcile Hawking’s conclusions with the old picture of the hole, where one can think of the black hole as being empty space with all its mass in the center.

One theory, the wormhole paradigm, suggested that black holes might be one end of a bridge in the space-time continuum, meaning anything that entered a black hole might appear on the other end of the bridge — the other end of the wormhole — in a different place in space and time.

In order for the wormhole picture to work, though, some low-energy radiation would have to escape from the black hole at its edges.

The new study proved a theorem — the ‘effective small corrections theorem’ — to show that if that were to happen, black holes would not appear to radiate in the way that they do.

The authors also examined physical properties from black holes, including topology change in quantum gravity, to determine whether the wormhole paradigm would work.

“In each of the versions that have been proposed for the wormhole approach, we found that the physics was not consistent,” Professor Mathur said.

“The wormhole paradigm tries to argue that, in some way, you could still think of the black hole as being effectively empty with all the mass in the center.”

“And the theorems we prove show that such a picture of the hole is not a possibility.”

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Bin Guo et al. 2021. Contrasting the fuzzball and wormhole paradigms for black holes. Turk J Phys 45: 281-365; doi: 10.3906/2111-13

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